Andreas Malm, in The Wilderness

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35
brill.com/hima
In Wildness is the Liberation of the World:

On Maroon Ecology and Partisan Nature
Andreas Malm
Human Ecology Division, Lund University
Andreas.Malm@hek.lu.se
Abstract
For good reasons, the green movement turned from wilderness to environmental jus-
tice as its central category in the 1980s and ’90s. Today, several leading wilderness advo-
cates seem to compete for the most reactionary positions, particularly on the issue of
migration. A case can, however, be made for a progressive, cosmopolitan, Marxist view
of wilderness as a space less fully subjugated to capital than others. There is a long his-
tory of exploited and persecuted people seeking freedom in and through the wild. This
essay focuses on two such groups – maroons and Jewish partisans – and asks what we
lose in a rapidly warming world where the remotest and supposedly wildest corners of
the world are among the first to be destroyed.
Keywords
wilderness – migration – slavery – maroons – Jewish partisans – climate change
Wilderness has got a bad name in the environmental movement. It might be

hard to imagine, but when that movement first appeared on the map of mod-
ern politics in the United States in the 1960s and then spread to other advanced
capitalist countries, its core concern was the protection of wilderness areas.
It was all about cultivating reverence for untouched nature. From the stand-
point of the present, this looks like an age of innocence, and one of serious
biases. The aura of naivety which now surrounds the years of tree-hugging
* This Deutscher Memorial Prize lecture was presented in London on 10 November 2017.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001610

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and dreaming of the wild is a function of the catastrophic magnitude of more

recent threats – climate change is a matter of life and mass-death, not sce-
nic beauty – but also the outcome of internal battles in the environmental
movement. In the 1980s and ’90s, a barrage of arguments was directed against
American wilderness ideology with devastating effect.1
The prototypical wilderness subject is a white male bourgeois individual.
By making wild nature his realm, he symbolically re-enacts his conquest of
the world. He leaves effeminate civilisation behind, demonstrates his sur-
vival skills and penetrates virgin nature: this is how he becomes a real man.
His masculinity is bound up with an unmistakable racial identity – most
obviously, the national parks in which he roams can be perceived as wild only
because the indigenous populations have been expelled. He is the white settler
who takes hold of the land again.
To take but one example from the canon: the shibboleth of mainstream
wilderness ideology is a saying from Henry David Thoreau: ‘In wildness is the
preservation of the world.’ This phrase sooner or later appears in practically
all anglophone writings on wilderness and is still compulsively invoked as jus-
tification for caring about the wild. In what context did Thoreau write these
words? He did it in the midst of an extended argument for wilderness as the
essential setting for the American empire: declaring himself ‘a true patriot’,
he asserted that the impulse to trek into the western wild is the source of ‘the
commerce and enterprise of modern times’ – without it, all would come to a
standstill.2 So in wildness is the preservation of a world where men continue
to make national and commercial progress.
More fundamentally, standard American wilderness ideology seems to pro-
duce a pernicious antinomy: if authentic nature appears only where humans
do not, then people are by definition the nemesis of nature – as soon as they
are present, the pristine landscape most worthy of protection goes up in smoke.
A positive, sustainable relationship is precluded: our species must keep off and
preferably reduce our numbers to leave the earth in peace. Human alienation
from nature is a virtue. Working people are axiomatically ignored.
From the 1980s onwards, these arguments and many others demolished
classical, American-inflected wilderness ideology. Their formulation coincided
with the rise of a completely different idea: that of environmental justice. Here
1 The key contributions to the debate – and more – can be found in Callicott and Nelson (eds.)
1998; Nelson and Callicott (eds.) 2008. For an up-to-date overview, see Vannini and Vannini
2016.
2 Thoreau 1868, pp. 180–1. Thoreau, of course, had other things to say in his life as a writer, but
it is surely revealing that the rallying-cry of American wilderness ideology has its source in
this eminently chauvinistic text.

In Wildness is the Liberation | doi 10.1163/1569206X-00001610 3
the focus is precisely on the places where humans live and work, the funda-
mental observation being that subaltern groups – people of colour, women,
workers – tend to bear the brunt of environmental degradation. Ecological
crisis is the consequence of power relations, and so any serious mitigation of
the former requires that the latter be overhauled. One influential conceptu-
alisation of this insight is ‘the environmentalism of the poor’, a notion coined
by Joan Martínez-Alier. It departs from a rejection of ‘the cult of wilderness’
and instead posits the material interests of poor people as the major force for
sustainability: poor farmers want to protect their soil from oil-spills, fisherfolk
to keep out industrial fleets, forest-dwellers to stop the construction of coal-
fired power plants on their land – not because they want to conserve nature
for its own sake, but because they simply seek to preserve the foundations for
their livelihoods.3 With the breakthrough of this idea, wilderness has got a bad
reputation – as a quintessentially bourgeois preoccupation, white and male
and antagonistic to the interests of working people, who could not care less for
the nature that lies beyond the confines of their everyday life.
Celebrating the Dark Mountain
Now let there be no mistake: wilderness deserves this reputation. It is perpetu-

ally reinforced by some of the most prominent remaining wilderness advo-
cates, who seem to compete for the most reactionary positions. Consider, in the
United Kingdom, the case of Paul Kingsnorth, acclaimed novelist and founder
of the Dark Mountain Project, who in 2017 released an essay collection called
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. In the opening paragraph of the
title essay, he sets the scene: Kingsnorth recalls a walk high up on a moor with
his father: ‘I am twelve years old. I am alone, I am scared, I am cold and I am
crying my eyes out. […] [My father] was always there, somewhere up ahead,
but he had decided it would be good for me to “learn to keep up” with him. All
of this, he tells me, will make me into a man.’ It is the foundational scene, once
again: the boy becoming a real man by weathering the wild. Kingsnorth’s book
forms one long lamentation for the loss of the magic of that initiation rite.
After learning to keep up with his father, the young man vowed ‘that this would
be my life’s work: saving nature from people.’ That calling was expressed in the
Dark Mountain manifesto, culminating in the declaration: ‘Beyond the gates,
3 See Guha and Martínez-Alier 1997; Martínez-Alier 2002; Anguelovski and Martínez-Alier
2014.

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out into the wilderness, is where we are headed. And there we shall make for
the higher ground’.4
Now this 2017 version of classical wilderness ideology is formulated in
explicit opposition to the environmental movement. Kingsnorth’s essays are
fuelled by a burning animus towards the left for having taken over that move-
ment, discarded the commandments of wilderness and raised in their place
the golden calf of environmental justice. He is nostalgic for the early 1990s
when deep ecology was all the rage among protesters who climbed trees to
stop highways in England. In those days, environmentalists were rooted in wild
places. Then came the break, when environmentalism
was being sucked into the yawning, bottomless chasm of the ‘progressive’
left. Suddenly people like me, talking about birch trees and hilltops and
sunsets, were politely, or less politely, elbowed to one side by people who
were bringing a ‘class analysis’ to green politics. […] We were told that
‘(human) social justice and environmental justice go hand in hand’ – a
suggestion of such bizarre inaccuracy that it could surely only be wishful
thinking. […] Today’s environmentalism is about people. It’s a consola-
tion prize for a gaggle of washed-up Trots.5
I guess people like myself are supposed to take this personally: we are just a
gaggle of washed-up Trots who have been randomly looking around for causes
that can serve as compensation for our other defeats and, without any genu-
ine passion for nature, seized the environmental movement in what must be
the most successful operation of entryism in history. One effect is that Paul
Kingsnorth withdrew. He did not want to be part of the movement any longer,
since – worst of all – it has exchanged the wild for a ‘single-minded obses-
sion with climate change’ and the promotion of renewable energy.6 His book
is intended as a spiritual health warning to be slapped on any sort of collective
activism: stay away, withdraw to the dark mountain, any action is a waste of
time that will only make you despair, acknowledge that collapse is inevitable
and not necessarily that harmful, buy yourself a piece of land and grow your
own carrots and put down roots in the mud and then you will find, like Paul
Kingsnorth, peace of mind.
But if this consummate defeatist has given up on organised environmental-
ism, there is one cause he still champions with fervour: nationalism. In the
4 Kingsnorth 2017a, pp. 61, 66, 280; emphases added.

5 Kingsnorth 2017a, pp. 74–8.
6 Kingsnorth 2017a, p. 43.

pages of The Guardian, Kingsnorth preaches the gospel of ‘green national-

ism’. People have special emotional bonds to their homelands; a nation is a
shared feeling of belonging to particular biota, such as the moor; protecting
the badgers of one’s own birthplace is true patriotism; we have to bank on
‘ecological Englishness’ as the source of hope. The enemy is ‘globalism’, also
referred to as the ‘cosmopolitan citadels’, a nebulous and nefarious alliance of
the left and the neoliberals pulling up the roots of people and throwing them
around in a whirl of confusion. This figure of thought should be familiar, and
yet it passes for respectable opinion. Naturally, it makes for a clear result on
the litmus test of our times: attitudes to migration. In one of his essays for The
Guardian, Kingsnorth writes: ‘To a globalist, border walls and immigration laws
are tantamount to racism or human rights abuse. To a nationalist’ – such as
himself – ‘they are evidence of a community asserting its values’.7
Mass immigration is the stick the left and the neoliberals force down the
throat of resistant Englishmen. The Confessions contain some figures about
the hair-raising levels it has reached: in 2011, 13 per cent of England’s popu-
lation was foreign-born, while in ‘the capital, English people had become an
ethnic minority’ – another way of saying that to count as English, your skin has
to be white.8 It is time to put a stop to it – or, as Kingsnorth proclaimed already
in 2008: ‘Immigration and emigration should be pretty much balanced. This
means a big cut in immigration from the present numbers.’9 In other words:
build more walls.
If Kingsnorth is the tortured soul and feted belles-lettrist of contemporary
English wilderness ideology, Dave Foreman is the gruffy and grizzly caretaker
of the American version. Founder of EarthFirst! and pioneer of rewilding, his
latest book is called Man Swarm: How Overpopulation Is Killing the Wild World:
but it is not really overpopulation killing the wild world so much as mass
migration, all the Latinos crossing the border and stamping on precious wild-
life, building their houses in our American wilderness areas and deliberately
having too many babies. On full display here is a long-standing American tra-
dition of the crudest animosity to non-whites derived from compassion for
the wild.10 This is a school of thought that evidently belongs on the far right,
but it remains a fringe phenomenon. The most successful players of the far
right pride themselves on their total indifference or outright hostility to
7 Kingsnorth 2017b; emphasis added. ‘Cosmopolitan citadels’: the Dark Mountain Mani
festo, in Kingsnorth 2017a, p. 284.
8 Kingsnorth 2017a, p. 202.
9 Kingsnorth 2008.
10 Foreman 2014. An excellent analysis of this school of thought in the US and its disturb-
ingly deep roots in American environmentalism is Hultgren 2015.

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environmental issues, but I suspect that we might see more of this: intellectu-
als and party leaders who say we cannot take in any more people if we want to
keep our nature intact. Perhaps the rising tide of the right will lift all its boats,
particularly if climate change really does induce migration on a magnitude far
exceeding what we have seen in recent years.
But I think we should also take this as a moment to celebrate. Washed-up
Trots and other kinds of leftists we might be, but we really have won the battle
over the soul of this movement: justice has dethroned wilderness, deep ecology
is dead, ecological Marxism is hot, reactionaries like Kingsnorth and Foreman
have had to climb trees that stand closer to the Front National than to Friends
of the Earth. Here is a cause for celebration – but we can also, I think, feel so
comfortable in our triumph, so safe in the solidity and prevalence of the justice
paradigm, that we can afford to ask if something more than dirty bathwater
has been thrown out.
Towards a People’s History of Wilderness
To answer this question, we first have to ask if there is any such thing as wilder-
ness. One conclusion from the many piercing critiques of the classical ideol-
ogy was the denial of its existence: since all ecosystems everywhere bear the
imprint of human activities, there is no wilderness to be found. If it is still
referred to as such, it is nothing but a social construction. This argument
has recently been pushed to its logical extreme by Steven Vogel in his book
Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature, the title
paraphrasing Aldo Leopold’s injunction to think like a mountain: according to
Vogel, a mountain is just as much a social construction as a shopping mall, and
hence environmentalists should learn to love the latter as much as the former,
both being parts of a built environment worthy of preservation, both as thor-
oughly moulded by human action as any other spot on earth.11
This is an obfuscation of a common experience. If I move from a mall to a
mountain, I will likely traverse two crucial differences: first, the mall has been
ordered, designed and built from the ground up by humans – more precisely,
by the forces of capital – whereas the mountain has been shaped by move-
ments in the earth’s crust, erupting volcanoes, travelling ice sheets and other
forces in which humans have had no hand at all. Second, what goes on inside
the mall is closely regulated by its private owners – what shops are open, what
goods are on display, what brands advertised, what décor used – whereas in
11 Vogel 2015.

the mountain, chances are that water springs forth in a stream without any-
one having pushed a button, wolves and lemmings and foxes feed and repro-
duce of their own accord, plants grow and leaves fall with no investors pulling
the strings: natural processes play out without direct human control. One
would have to wear thick constructionist goggles not to spot these differences.
In terms of the distinctive features and the daily occurrences, of morphology
and causal novelty, wildness – the quality of being untamed, unsubsumed – is
present in a considerably higher degree in the mountain than in the mall. This
is reason enough to deem the mountain a wilderness – not in any absolute
sense, of course, but in a relative one. Nowhere on earth – here the construc-
tionists are right – is there any such thing as absolute wilderness, meaning
landscapes in a perfectly pristine condition, with no trammelling from humans:
those areas are long dead and gone. But there is still plenty of relative wil-
derness, in the sense of places where wildness is comparatively salient and
determinant.
This is a question of contrast. We are not talking about two galaxies, but
about a continuous spectrum running from the most artificial environment –
say, a space station or a drone control centre – to the remotest corner of a
desert or a rainforest. Wildness and humans are present in both, but in greatly
varying proportions.12 If we proceed with a conception of relative wilderness,
we can keep our eyes open to the landscapes that carry marks of human pres-
ence but have not been built by the exploiters and are not manipulated by them
on a daily basis. And the presence of such landscapes can be of some impor-
tance for the class struggle.
The fact that the ruling ideas about wilderness are the ideas of the ruling
class is no more reason to dispense with that category than the same fact
about democracy or freedom or justice for that matter. Surely we can have a
Marxist theory about wilderness: if Marxism is almighty because it is true, than
it should encompass this part of the world as well. Can there also be a cos-
mopolitan theory of wilderness? Can there be a wilderness cult of the poor?
Might there be a point where wilderness and justice converge? Is it possible
to redeem a politics and aesthetics of the wild from the past centuries or even
millennia of struggle between the classes? I believe these questions can all be
answered in the affirmative. What I am going to do here is to share some bits
from a research project that aims to excavate a hidden tradition of subaltern
wilderness practices and ideas, with examples from the very first state forma-
tions up to late-late capitalism.
12 This argument draws on e.g. Plumwood 1998; Hailwood 2015, e.g. pp. 47–8, 246; Woods
2005.

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Why is this of any interest? First, it is an aspect of history from below that
has not been isolated and systematically explored, and that in itself makes it
interesting for historical materialism. Second, we are living in a rapidly warm-
ing world that is wreaking havoc on places of a wild character, and we need to
know what is at stake. Likewise, we are living in a world where remaining wil-
derness areas are under onslaught from restless corporations: we need ideas
for that resistance too. By retrieving a people’s history of the wilderness, we
can – perhaps – learn more about the losses we face and the reasons to fight for
what remains and for what can be regained. Third, and last, we should not let
go of aesthetics: what we lose when we lose wild nature partly has to do with
beauty. Marxists, as much as any other people, need an appreciation of that.
Even as constructionist a thinker as Neil Smith once wrote:
I want to insist that the re-enchantment of nature not be left to the right,
or even to a sentimental liberalism, and that such deep feelings of con-
nectedness to nature somehow be mobilized against establishment envi-
ronmentalism. Having said this, I am immediately hesitant about where
such a project starts, how it can be pursued, and where it might lead.13
He left it there, and no ecological Marxists have, to my knowledge, pursued

the project further. But it so happens that subaltern people in many periods in
history have left traces of a deep connectedness to nature and, in particular, a
keen appreciation of the wild. I will give only a very compressed version of two
examples: maroons and Jewish partisans. These are both extreme cases, but
from the darkest midnights in history they have a particular capacity to illumi-
nate the questions at hand. Wilderness is traditionally seen as the antithesis of
civilisation. We know that every achievement of civilisation is also at the same
time an exercise in barbarism. What function, then, does wilderness assume
when civilisation descends into barbarism in its most extreme forms?
In Permanent Opposition to Everything Below
We would do well to remember that the capitalist class was brought up on

hatred against the wild. That hatred was eloquently expressed by John Locke,
pre-eminent theorist of agrarian capitalism: in his scheme of things, the origi-
nal condition of the world was that of a ‘wild Common of Nature’. The mission
13 Smith 1998, p. 278.

of human beings – more precisely property-owning, industrious human

beings – was to abolish that condition: the wild commons ought to be enclosed,
rendered productive, improved – that is, transformed into a source of profit.
‘Land that is left wholly to Nature, that hath no improvement of Pasturage,
Tillage, or Planting, is called, as indeed it is, Waste; and we shall find the benefit
of it amount to little more than nothing.’14 Wild land is worthless waste – more,
it is an abomination in the eyes of capitalists, for it is a space of resources that
has not yet been subjugated to the rule of exchange-value.
One space where this logic played out on an epochal scale was the slave
plantation. The first step in establishing a plantation was invariably to order
slaves to cut down the spontaneously growing vegetation – to ‘clear the land’,
as it was known. Marvellously complex and diverse tropical forests were torn
down to make room for the privately owned plots of land, the geometric grids
of fields devoted to the cultivation of sugar, rice, coffee or cotton. First in the
Caribbean and later in the American South, land with a high degree of wild-
ness – maintained after centuries of indigenous, pre-capitalist agriculture –
was ripped up and turned into radically simplified, strictly controlled sites
for the production of one or a couple of commodities for export. White set-
tlers explicitly conceived of this as a war against wilderness. In representative
terms, one chronicler of the American South described the cotton boom in
Mississippi:
Fortunes were made in a day […] and unexampled prosperity seemed

to cover the land as with a golden canopy – forests were swept away in a
week; labor came in crowds to the South to produce cotton; and where
yesterday the wilderness darkened over the land with her wild forests,
to-day the cotton plantation whitened the earth.15
Land and black bodies were here reduced to the single purpose of working for
white profit.
This elementary fusion of the domination of nature and the domination of
labour was well understood by the slaves themselves, as is evident in the first
pamphlet describing slave unrest in the New World, in Barbados in 1676. This
is, we read, a
14 Locke 2016, pp. 26, 23. On Locke’s ideal of improvement and English agrarian capitalism
as the context for his views, see Wood 1984; Wood 2012, pp. 266–7.
15 Sparks 1870, p. 364. Two studies foregrounding these ecological dimensions of slavery are
Stewart 2002; Johnson 2013; a good survey of the Caribbean is Hollsten 2008.

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subject, which hath occasioned the Reflection of a Negro much quoted

by the Inhabitants, for saying, The Devel was in the English-man, that he
makes every thing work; he makes the Negro work, the Horse work, the Ass
work, the Wood work, the Water work, and the Winde work.16
I think that is a stunning quotation which pretty much anticipates the col-
lected wisdom of ecological Marxism – what do we need to add?: it is the devil
that took possession of the Englishman in the transition to capitalism which
continues to wreck the elements of nature and the bodies of property-less
people, non-white ones in particular. That devil had a long way to go in the sev-
enteenth century. Flat like the side of a coin, Barbados could be shaved clean
of all forest and converted into one giant plantation, but in quite a few other
colonies, the planters only managed to seize hold of some spaces. There the
effect was rather the appearance of a novel contrast: while the plantations were
confines for the tyranny of the masters, beyond them now lay a relative wilder-
ness. The masters detested that space as not-yet-cleared, untamed, savage –
and in exactly the same proportion, slaves cherished it as a land of freedom.
This was the space of the maroons. The word ‘maroon’ comes from the
Spanish cimarrón, meaning wild or feral or unruly, used originally for cattle
that had escaped into the wild. The maroons were slaves who escaped into
the wild, for short stints or permanent settlement in remote communities.17
They were the chronic plague of the plantation system, extending into its hin-
terlands from Virginia to Peru, wherever there were wild commons of nature
within reach. In her Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons, the
best book among many written on marronage in recent years, Sylviane Diouf
explains how the very act of running away dealt three blows to the system: the
maroon removed the slaveholder’s property – the black body – from his grasp,
deprived him of the product of her labour, and denied him authority over the
reproduction of what was supposed to be his workforce. Beyond this instant
subversion, the maroons also effected a more long-lasting destabilisation. They
operated as a magnet of resistance, tempting slaves still on the plantations
to rebel, proving that total control was elusive, permanently manifesting the
artificiality and transience of slavery.18 They kept alive the imagination of
the slaves – an effect that is, of course, impossible to quantify and hard to
prove, given the fact that the maroons strove for maximum secrecy and never
16 Anon. 1676, pp. 6–7.

17 See e.g. the classical anthology on marronage: Price (ed.) 1996.
18 Diouf 2014.

left behind written archives. But it is an effect that has been creatively recon-
structed by black writers, particularly in the Caribbean.
In The Fourth Century, his amazing novel about the maroons in Martinique,
Édouard Glissant builds the narrative of this island’s history on the contrast
between the subsumed plains and the wild woods – a dichotomy he gives an
almost Manichean, Fanonian sharpness. In the beginning, two slaves disem-
bark from a ship. One of them lets himself be sold to a plantation, the other
makes for the hills on his very first hour on Martinican soil: one accepts, the
other refuses. The maroon is the ‘vanguard’, the owner of the forest whom the
slaves later seek out for counsel, the shadowy presence who makes the dream
possible – or, in Glissant’s words: the vocation of the maroon in the moun-
tain ‘is to be permanently opposed to everything below’ and ‘thus to find the
strength to survive.’19 Under the right circumstances, that permanent opposi-
tion might deploy its wild troops as a force for revolution. In his national epic
Texaco, Glissant’s compatriot Patrick Chamoiseau spells out this vision: the
task is ‘to take with the utmost urgency what the békés’ – the planters – ‘had
not yet taken: the hills, the Southern drylands, the misty heights, the depths
and the ravines, and then to besiege those places that they created, those plac-
es in which no one could foresee our ability to unravel their History into our
thousand stories.’20 Such is the strategic logic of maroon ecology.
The Free Forests of Dominica
In early August 2017, I visited the island of Dominica. The shores rising out of
the sea were, as ever, covered by impossibly green woods. On the slopes of the
mountains, trees and plants jostled for space and stretched towards the sun, as
though they were on the verge of leaving the ground and soaring into the sky, so
that the whole place seemed to be bursting with green. It was the most densely
forested country in the Caribbean. No other island in the region is so consis-
tently mountainous. From this base sprouted a history unlike that of any other
Caribbean nation – as Lennox Honychurch, the pre-eminent historian and in-
tellectual of the country, writes in his In the Forests of Freedom: The Fighting
Maroons of Dominica, the island ‘continued to stand green and defiant’, until
the British finally conquered it in 1761.21 Having exhausted much of the soil on
Barbados and other old sugar islands, planters were now clamouring for fresh
19 Glissant 2001, pp. 16, 141.

20 Chamoiseau 1998, p. 54.
21 Honychurch 2017, p. 20.

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land and immediately set about surveying, enclosing, auctioning and buying
plots. The new governor invited investors with the promise of a profit rate five
times higher than in the old colonies.
For capital accumulation to get off the ground, however, one obstacle first
had to be removed: the woods. In a tract from 1791, planter Thomas Atwood
marvelled at the beauty of the trees that ‘by far exceed in loftiness the tall-
est trees in England. In this island their tops seem to touch the clouds, which
appear as if skimming swiftly over their upper branches’, proceeding to explain
why they must be cut down. There could be no avoiding
the necessity, in order to render Dominica a good sugar country, of clear-

ing the extensive forests of trees in the interior parts of it. When this is
done, and not till then, will this island be distinguished for the number of
its sugar plantations, and for the quantity of sugar it is absolutely capable
of raising.22
This plan for the denudation of Dominica was never implemented. For as
sure as the cat-o’-nine-tails and gibbets arrived with the English, so a new
people settled inside the woods: the maroons. With comparative ease, slaves
in Dominica could head up to one of the camps in the hills, where their mas-
ters were unlikely to ever track them down. Back in August of 2017 I could still
see the contours of one such camp, named after maroon leader Jacko who
ensconced his followers on a plateau high up in the rainforest, above the swift-
flowing river Layou, which the English unsuccessfully sought to rename ‘the
Thames’.23 An old farmer by the name of Magnus, with a few words of English
but the most intimate knowledge of the forest and a small plot of land not
far from the site, guided us. It was a steamy, rainy day. The vegetation seemed
to be on a fresh riot, figs and palms, guavas and cedars, mahoganies and tree
ferns and swamp apples running over each other. The yellow land-crabs
endemic to the Lesser Antilles crawled over the trail and fenced wildly with
their claws against any human feet coming close, before disappearing into
a puddle or hiding under some roots. The Jaco parrot endemic to Dominica
squawked in a high pitch in the canopy above. Magnus picked leaves of wild
basil and gave them to my daughter, to her delight. Having waded knee-deep
through the Layou, we could take only one route up to the plateau: through
stairs cut deeply into the cliffs, forming coiling defiles, at their narrowest less
than half a metre wide. Any company coming here would have to walk in single
22 Atwood 1791, pp. 22, 81.


file. Each carved high above the next, the more than one-hundred steps made
for slow and arduous climbing. In the deepest wild of Dominica, this more
than two-centuries-old manmade construction stood intact: a mousetrap for
the English soldiers, easily picked off by Jacko’s maroons.
The planters could never quite tame this island. In the Forests of Freedom
details how it was effectively divided into two zones: one tiny ribbon of plan-
tations along the coastlines, one vast interior realm of maroon power where
the whites dared not tread. An English governor referred to the latter as an
‘imperium in imperio’, a state within a state. Loosely federated villages were
ruled by black chiefs, who had often been born in West Africa and knew how
to arrange small huts and gardens into self-sufficient communities, protected
by armed fighters and actively expanded by recruiters sent down to the estates.
Inevitably, the two states came to blows. After several rounds of fighting, in
the early 1810s, when the colony was on the verge of collapsing due to mass
flight and raids against the plantations, the English finally managed to mobil-
ise a force that could fight the maroons with skill and motivation: other slaves,
promised their freedom if they killed a chief. Desperate blacks pitted against
desperate blacks, the whites won the last war in Dominica.24
But it was too late. The English had missed the opportunity to turn Dominica
into a lucrative sugar or cotton or coffee island. It lived through the shortest
and frailest plantation system anywhere in the Caribbean. After the abolition
of slavery in 1834, there was not – uniquely – any white ruling class that could
uphold power by other means: Dominica fell to the blacks. The former slaves
retired inland to engage in subsistence farming. When English author Anthony
Trollope stopped by in 1860, he moaned: ‘there are no shops that can properly
so be called. The people wander about, idle, chattering, listless; there is no sign
of money made or of money making’.25 From his perspective, a human society
could not possibly descend to a lower state, but from the opposite one, the
maroons founded a high culture. With Honychurch, their legacy has inspired ‘a
respect for the forested citadel of this island’, where peasants such as Magnus
practised horticulture and trade on a small scale, up until August this year. At
that point, the forest cover on the island was greater than at any time since the
English conquest.26
24 See Pattullo (ed.) 2015; Vaz 2016. ‘Imperium in imperio’: letter from governor Ainslie
included in Pattullo 2015, p. 114.
25 Trollope 1862, p. 154. For the history of Dominica after emancipation, see Honychurch
1975.

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The Resistance Science of Jamaica
In western Jamaica, there is a vast forest known as the Cockpit Country. It is

a karst landscape, formed through the dissolution of limestone rocks, taking
the shape of many hundreds of mountain peaks that look like cones or hay-
stacks. If you walk alongside or between their almost perpendicular sides you
can reach deep valleys or bowls, which the English called ‘cockpits’ because
they reminded them of pits for cock-fighting. From above, the Cockpit Country
looks like an egg tray; from below, the peaks appear to be shooting up like tow-
ers. Vultures loop slowly between them, scanning the forest floor for dead frogs
or rats. It is more like a wall of vegetation than anything a northern European
would normally associate with the word ‘forest’; it takes two people with
machetes to cut through the bulwark of tree ferns and grasses and lianas, and
you have to be constantly on the look-out for sinkholes and loose, sharp-edged
boulders. One English eighteenth-century governor of Jamaica despaired at
this landscape as ‘the most rugged and mountainous country in the universe’,
‘a country of rocks beyond description – wild and barren into which no white
person has ever entered’.27 It was the base for one of the two maroon groups
that made life hell for the white settlers in Jamaica in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Their leader was Cudjoe, a runaway slave who, according
to English sources, had ‘a peculiar wildness in his manners’.28
Today, the Cockpit Country is in the custody of people like Michael Grizzle,
chief of the Trelawney Town maroons, one of five communities in Jamaica
with an unbroken lineage from the original maroons. He is the chairman of the
local forest-management committee, in charge of protecting the area – which
the government has refused to designate as a national park, for reasons I will
return to – and maintains the most detailed inventory of the forest, its herbs
and trees and wildlife. When I spent time with him, he took me to the entrance
to the cockpit where Cudjoe’s followers had their main settlement: a gorge
where they could easily ambush the English. Beyond it lay the cave where they
fetched water and the valley where they lived.
On the other side of Jamaica, high up in the eastern Blue Mountains, is the
site of the base of the other original maroon group. Here the terrain might not
be quite as treacherous, but the peaks are higher and richer in long precipices
and waterfalls. Getting up to the base requires the worst hike I have ever un-
dertaken: a painful ascent along ravines and ridges, until one reaches Stony
River, the most fabled river in Jamaican maroon culture. A stone’s throw from
27 Governor Balcarres quoted in Campbell 1988, pp. 216, 218–19.

28 United Service Journal 1830, p. 139.

it is Nanny Town. Here ruled the band led by Nanny, queen of the maroons,
heroine of the Jamaican wild. In the oral traditions, Nanny is the spiritual
source of independence and freedom from slavery – or, as one maroon elder
told an American anthropologist in the 1970s: ‘White man say, “you fe work”.
Grandy Nanny say, “me not working!” And she tek de river, follow river! She fol-
low river.’29 This imperative directly negates the logic of the English devil, and
‘follow the river’ remains a maroon saying with deep resonances, referring in
the last instance to Stony River and the space of liberty carved out around it
by Nanny.
She is remembered as the magician of ‘resistance science’, as it is called in
Vic Reid’s novel Nanny-Town. In Reid’s literary vision, the maroons practise a
kind of rudimentary communism in Nanny Town and adore their leader as
the mother of all good things. She is the head of the ‘mothers and daughters
who made their homes in the wilderness’, the first among equals, who gathers
around her Africans from all ethnic backgrounds and tells them: ‘it does not
matter where we come from; it matters that we are here’. They salute her with
the motto ‘the mountains are ours!’, and when they go out to fight the English,
whose puffy red faces and stinking sweat befoul the ineffably beautiful forests,
they merge with the land itself: ‘clothed ourselves in shrubs and branches, we
have become the forest’; we ‘went into battle like the flow of a river, following
the bend and fall of the land’; ‘we had shown them that we were one with the
forests.’30
At least this latter part of Reid’s vision is fully confirmed by written sources
from the English, who tended to perceive the maroons and the mountains
as one single threat of wild counter-power. The military technique of these
fugitive slaves was indeed the perfection of guerrilla warfare – using the land-
scape to one’s own advantage – the ambushes in the Cockpit Country and the
Blue Mountains regularly wiping out entire English expeditions without a sin-
gle maroon being killed. From the beginning of the English occupation in 1655,
the maroons harassed the plantations with raids, prevented their expansion
into the interior of the island and forced planters to abandon dozens of proper-
ties, until in the 1730s the colony reached the same point of near-implosion as
Dominica 80 years later: slaves deserting en masse, discipline unravelling, the
maroons laying siege to the settler towns – until, in 1734, troops called in from
Gibraltar and so-called black-shots finally managed to take over Nanny Town.
To mark their victory over the ‘wild negroes’, the English carved an inscription
into a stone that can still be seen at the site. It says: ‘This Town was took by
29 Bilby 2005, p. 106.

30 Reid 1983, quotations from pp. 92, 95, 125, 71, 8; emphasis in original.

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Coll Brook and after kept by Capt Cooke’, a few words that in all their formality
convey a deep sense of certified superiority and accomplished domestication.31
Marronage as Betrayal and Beacon
After the fall of Nanny Town, both maroon groups found themselves encircled
by enemy troops: and then came the turning-point in Jamaican maroon his-
tory. Cudjoe signed a treaty with the English. It guaranteed his maroons per-
petual freedom from slavery and right to the lands in and around the Cockpit
Country – on the condition that they track down runaway slaves and return
them to their owners and help the government suppress any future rebellions.
The same kind of treaty was signed by Nanny’s maroons, although legend has
it that she herself resisted the deal. After 1739, the maroon communities of
Jamaica – now safe and secure in their enclaves – operated as the roving police-
force of the plantation regime, scouring the woods for runaways and coming
down to the estates when the masters needed to quell some disturbance. The
evidence is contradictory, but some of it suggests that the maroons performed
the task with considerable zeal and enthusiasm, eager to prove themselves
distinct from simple slaves and happy to earn the pounds the planters would
pay them as bounty. After the treaties, calm descended on Jamaica for the first
time: only now did the island enter its fabulous boom as a sugar colony. The
maroons owned slaves too. When emancipation came, they were compensated
by the British state just like white slave-owners.
How was this possible? How could former slaves, who had suffered all the
unspeakable degradation of that fate, then fled into the wild and waged a suc-
cessful war against the whites for decades – how could they suddenly somer-
sault into a role as mercenaries catching other slaves, sending them back to
be whipped and providing the system with precisely the stability the masters
had craved for so long? This is the puzzle of Jamaican marronage. It runs like
a raw nerve through the extant communities and their relations with the rest
of the population. If you speak to maroons today, they have several strategies
for dealing with this part of their history: some ignore it, in an act of collective
denial; some justify it, on the grounds that the maroons had to choose between
extinction and collaboration; some, quite disturbingly, profess pride in how
their ancestors were entrusted with the ‘protection of the island’. Quite a few
other Jamaicans, whose ancestors might have been caught or even killed by
maroons, regard them with suspicion to this day.
31 ‘Wild negroes’: Lieutenant Thickness quoted in Campbell 1988, p. 124.

As for explaining the sell-out, we should note, first, that it was not unique
to Jamaica: several other maroon groups across the Americas were granted
the privilege of freedom in exchange for chasing down fugitives and rebels.
Moreover, the phenomenon is not unique to slave resistance. Just consider
the PLO, the sulta and the despicable security coordination that keeps the
West Bank under Zionist control. Several scholars of marronage point to
the absence of universalist ideas and a programme for liberation as a factor
behind the betrayal: the maroons sought freedom only for themselves and
were ready to pay any price to get it. This is surely part of the story, but we
should also ask if there was something about self-emancipation in the wilder-
ness that predisposed the maroons to this betrayal. As revolutionary Marxists,
we know that the form of subaltern politics which does not contain within it
a seed of degeneration has yet to be discovered. When you withdraw into the
wild, however much of a vanguard you might be, there is a risk that your bonds
to the masses fray and that you even develop a disdain towards those docile
creatures who have stayed behind. Glissant captures this element of maroon
psychology when profiling his maroon hero in the hills:
Possibly he thought the slaves were not worthy of his assistance. He had
no intention of staying in contact with the lowlands. Why don’t they all
become maroons? He did not know what was useful about their struggle
and their suffering. He did not understand that all of them would not
have been able to crowd up into the hills. […] He was cut off from them.32
There is little doubt that after the treaties, the Jamaican maroons developed a
self-image as a chosen people, the elect few who had exiled themselves from
bondage, a little bit better than other Jamaicans. To this day, you will find in
some of the maroon villages the graveyards divided into one section for the
true-born maroons and another for the rest.
Now space does not allow for a discussion of all the intricacies of marron-
age in Jamaica after the treaties, but let me just quickly point out some of the
essential facts. There was a second war between the maroons of Trelawney
Town and the English in the 1790s, which ended with their deportation to
Sierra Leone, from which most of them returned after emancipation: this is
the community today led by Michael Grizzle.33 Whatever can be said about
the maroons of Jamaica, they certainly helped to protect the Cockpit Country
and the Blue Mountains from deforestation. Their independent black polity in
32 Glissant 2001, p. 90.

33 The classic contemporary English account of this second war is Dallas 1803.

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the midst of white supremacy did constitute a fissure in the system. Thousands
of slaves continued to run away and hide in the wilderness right up to eman-
cipation, and in the series of mass uprisings that shook the plantations, the
treaty-bound maroons played a highly ambiguous role: on the one hand, they
killed several of the most prominent rebel leaders; on the other, their free sta-
tus served as an enduring inspiration. Tacky’s rebellion in 1760 aimed at mass
marronage on a larger scale than ever before, combined with the killing of
the masters, while the Christmas rebellion of 1831 began with slaves escaping,
continued with the burning of plantations and ended as yet another guerrilla
war inside the Cockpit Country. There is certainly truth in Jamaican historian
Orlando Patterson’s observation that ‘all sustained slave revolts must acquire a
Maroon dimension’.34
A Maroon State Writ Large
And nowhere is that truer than in that greatest of rebellions: the Haitian
revolution, the finest hour of the maroons. In her masterpiece The Making of
Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below, Carolyn Fick demonstrates
that marronage played a catalytic role at every critical juncture of the revolu-
tionary process. The main episode of organised resistance in Saint Domingue
before the revolution was the Makandal conspiracy, in which long-time ma-
roon Makandal, a figure reminiscent of Nanny, dispatched his accomplices
to kill the masters by poison. When delegates from the northern plantations
gathered to swear their allegiance to liberation in the ritual ceremony at Bois-
Caiman, they met, of course, inside thick woods. When the revolution broke
out, its first leaders were two former maroons, Boukman and Jean-François,
and the revolution itself took on the form of a maroon war on an unprece-
dented scale: tens of thousands of slaves absconded, picked up arms to defend
their freedom, established base-camps in the wildest available mountains and
used all the tactics of maroon warfare: camouflage, ambush, lightning raids on
the plantations. In the southern province, the pivot of the revolution was the
mega-camp high up on the wooded cliffs of Platons: there lived ten to twelve-
thousand maroons – more than ten times the number at Nanny Town – who
built their own homes and chose a king for themselves. These were the forces
that abolished slavery on the ground, and these were the forces that defeated
Napoleon’s attempt to reinstitute slavery. When Toussaint L’Ouverture had
34 Patterson 1996, p. 279. Two still very useful chronicles of Jamaican slave resistance are
Craton 1982; Hart 2002.

been deported, a plethora of maroon bands stepped in to fight the war to its
successful conclusion: the first free black state in the New World – or, as Ada
Ferrer, another historian of the event, calls it: ‘a maroon state writ large’.35
In the conjuncture of the Haitian revolution, marronage mutated from van-
guardism to generalised insurgency. It was the moment of a positive dialectic
between the cadres in the hills and the masses on the plains. And the precondi-
tion of it all was relative wilderness. In 1841, black abolitionist James McCune
Smith gave a lecture in defence of the Haitian revolution in the city of New
York, where he described the country as
intersected by a lofty range of mountains thickly serried with primeval

forests. […] The mountainous regions of the island […] were an elemen-
tary cause of the revolution, since amid their rugged passes slaves had
learnt that there was such a thing as successful resistance against their
masters, and such a thing also as compelling their masters to yield to
them their liberty.36
Now if slave resistance was a central driver of abolition, and if it is true that
all sustained slave revolts must acquire a Maroon dimension, then we are led
towards the conclusion that wilderness was a premise for emancipation. If the
New World had all been cleared and turned into one giant plantation, as the
capitalists of the time undoubtedly wanted, then who knows for how long slav-
ery would have persisted?
They Had Gone Out to What they Called the Wilderness
In any case, there is ample evidence to suggest that slaves, ex-slaves and radi-
cal abolitionists developed a subaltern cult of the wild. I will pick just a few
examples. In the 1860s, a Baptist reverend wrote a despondent report on how
hard it was to convert the Jamaicans to a proper practice of Christianity:
There was certainly much superstition mingled with their religious exer-
cises; many had wonderful dreams to tell, which they considered as pro-
phetic visions; some excited themselves by fanatical notions, and fell into
wild extravagances […], and from others we had learned that they had
gone out at night to what they called ‘the wilderness’,
35 Fick 1990; Ferrer 2014, p. 231.

36 McCune Smith 1841, p. 8.

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this last word emphasised in the original.37

From Cuba comes a unique document with the Spanish title ‘biografía de
un cimarrón’, in English translation Biography of a Runaway Slave. In 1963, a
Cuban anthropologist stumbled upon a man who was 103 years old and had
a perfectly clear mind. His name was Esteban Montejo, a former slave who
early in his life fled, lived alone as a maroon, came down from the mountains
after emancipation to work as a sugar-cane cutter, fought in the Cuban war of
independence and became one of the founders of the Communist Party in the
1920s. He told his life-story to the anthropologist, who published it as a book,
one of the most influential so-called documentary novels of the Cuban revolu-
tion, in which the fate of Montejo stands in for that of the people as a whole.
On the very first page, Montejo declares: ‘The long and short story of it is that
I know everything depends on Nature. Nature is everything.’ Then he goes on to
detail his experience as a young chattel slave, locked in barracks and exposed
to the usual horrors – he had to run away:
Little by little I got to know the woods. And I was getting to like them.
Sometimes I would forget that I was a cimarrón, and I would start to
whistle. […] I took care of myself like a spoiled child. I didn’t want to be
chained to slavery again. […] Truth is I lived well as a cimarrón, very hid-
den, very comfortable.38
Montejo found the adjustment from marronage to wage-labour difficult,

and he could never reconcile himself to the transformation of the Cuban
environment:
The sugar cane fever arrived, and they left hardly any forest in Cuba. Trees
were cut down at the roots. They took out mahoganies, cedars, indigo
trees. Well, the whole forest was chopped down. […] Now, if a person
goes up to the north of Las Villas he will probably say, ‘There is no forest
around here.’ But when I was a cimarrón, a person could be scared there.
It was thick like a jungle. Cane was grown, but it destroyed the beauty of
the country.39
Moving to the US, there is a fascinating history of marronage that is only now
being uncovered. The most legendary landscape is the Great Dismal Swamp,
37 Quoted in Craton 1982, p. 250.

38 Barnet 1994, pp. 17, 46–7. For the Cuban maroons, see La Rosa Corzo 2003.
39 Barnet 1994, p. 102; emphasis added.

a basin of woods and bogs and labyrinthine channels on the border between
Virginia and North Carolina that attracted thousands of slaves until the Civil
War. After years of excavations in the area, Marxist archaeologist Daniel Sayers
has recently dubbed these maroons the forgotten heroes of anti-capitalism;
indeed, he believes that they developed what he calls ‘a praxis mode of produc-
tion’ deep inside the Great Dismal Swamp, a society without exchange-value
and oppression and alienation.40 Now I suspect he is going a little bit too far
in his glorification of the maroons, but the Great Dismal Swamp certainly did
exercise a strong pull on the black imagination.
Many writers of slave narratives were careful to prove themselves civilised
in the eyes of white readers, break the debasing association between black-
ness and nature and distance themselves from the wilderness, but the more
militant writers had no such inhibitions.41 In the great novel of revolutionary
black abolitionism, Blake: Or, the Huts of America, Martin Delany tells the story
of Henry Blake, a fugitive slave who travels furtively between the plantations
to coordinate a final apocalyptic Haiti-like rising. The gatherings take place on
the outskirts of the plantations, in the nearest wild, but it is only when Henry
reaches the Great Dismal Swamp that he steps into the homeland of the revo-
lution: among the maroons in
the mystical, antiquated, and almost fabulous Dismal Swamp, where for
many years they have defied the approach of their pursuers. Here Henry
found himself surrounded by a different atmosphere, an entirely new
element. Finding ample scope for undisturbed action through the entire
region of the Swamp, he continued to go scattering to the winds and sow-
ing the seeds of a future crop, only to take root in the thick black waters
which cover it, to be grown in devastation and reaped in a whirl-wind
of ruin.42
Here the maroons are the custodians of the black revolution, the children
of Nat Turner, who will spring forth from the swamp and lead the enslaved
masses when the hour strikes.
When the hour actually did strike, if we accept W.E.B. Du Bois’s view of black
participation in the Civil War as ‘the largest and most successful slave revolt’,
the maroons living as such before 1861 played a marginal role.43 But the ideal of
40 Sayers 2015.

41 See Cowan 2005.
42 Delany 2017, p. 113.
43 Henderson 2015.

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wilderness was present. The commander of the first slave regiment mobilised
by the Northern side describes in a memoir how his soldiers marched through
the countryside of South Carolina, greeted friends at the plantations and joy-
ously sang military and missionary songs,
yielding presently to a grand burst of the favourite marching song among

them all, and one at which every step instinctively quickened, so light
and jubilant its rhythm, –
All true children gwine in de wilderness,

Gwine in de wilderness, gwine in de wilderness,
Tru believers gwine in de wilderness,
To take away de sins ob de world44
With these words, the black soldiers marched towards freedom, and so we can
indeed extract this as the ethos of revolutionary maroon ecology: in wildness
is the liberation of the world.
Fighting Fascism from the Forests
Now I have spoken at length about the maroons, but I have given just a very
small taste of an incredibly vast and complicated history. I have not traced
the inspiration drawn from marronage in postcolonial times, all the way up
to today’s Denmark, where a group of anti-racist intellectuals and activists
have just launched their challenge to that country’s ingrained racism and
repression of its colonial past in the form of a journal simply called Marronage.
There is a lot more to be said, but then marronage is only one episode in the
people’s history of wilderness: I could speak about the wilderness cult among
Ungsocialisterna, the fiercely anti-nationalist, revolutionary youth wing of the
Swedish Social-Democratic Party, or about Lenin’s obsessions with the wild,
or about the Bolsheviks’ trailblazing measures to protect the monuments of
nature after October, or about the German Communists who marched into
the woods and mountains to cultivate their class hatred, or about the place
of the wild in Palestinian literature – the cave in Elias Khoury’s Gate of the
Sun, the hills in the writings of Raja Shehadeh – or about the long tradition
of seeking-out and adulating the wilderness of northern Iran, from the Jangali
movement via the guerrilla cult of Siahkal to the underground union activists
44 Higginson 1870, p. 133. A fascinating analysis of this tradition is Nielson 2011.

hiking out-of-sight in the early twenty-first century. There is any number of

other possible examples, but I will restrict myself to the case of the Jewish par-
tisans in Eastern Europe and say just a few words about it.
There is a forest in Belarus by the name of Naliboki. It is an extensive, flat
area of marshes filled with rotting leaves and fallen trunks, thickets of gnarled
ancient trees, islands of oak groves, carpets of moss and meandering rivulets:
impenetrable to tanks and heavily armed troops. When the Holocaust neared
its climax, Naliboki was Jewish and Communist territory. Deep inside it is
the site of the main camp for the Bielski partisans, where nearly 1,000 Jews
lived; if you go there, you can still see the contours of the deep trenches they
built between their dugouts, functioning almost like streets in a shtetl, sub-
sequently filled up with soil. Here they had a school, a slaughterhouse, a bak-
ery, a synagogue, an assembly place. They called it New Yerushalaim, and on
7 November 1943 this was the scene of a massive celebration of the anniversary
of the Russian Revolution, attended by partisans from all over Naliboki.
During the Holocaust, no other group of Jews saved as many other Jews
as the Bielski partisans. But there is no monument or plaque at the site.
Incredibly, there has not even been an excavation. As Barbara Epstein argues
in her superb study The Minsk Ghetto, Jewish resistance in the forests has
been relegated to a place far below that inside the ghettos in the historiogra-
phy and remembrance: for in the forests, Communism in various shades and
forms was the dominant ideology.45 Zionists opted for ghetto uprisings, while
Communist Jews advocated the forest option, in cooperation with their non-
Jewish partisan allies. Nowhere else were so many Jews able to flee the ghetto
and engage in resistance as in Minsk, where the masses retained their faith in a
universalist – cosmopolitan, if you wish – ideology, and where the primeval
forests were never far away. The Nazis tore their hair. As Raul Hilberg noted:
‘Jews in the forests and marshes were a special problem because they were no
longer under control.’46
We can then immediately see a family resemblance between Jewish parti-
sanship and marronage: the plantation and the ghetto as cages, the intensified
contrast between spaces, the leap of the cadres, the desperate hope invested in
uncontrolled nature. There were, of course, also differences. The principal pur-
pose of the ghetto was not profit; the mission of the Nazis was not domination
as much as annihilation; constructing a ghetto did not presuppose transfor-
mation of an ecosystem – it was enough to roll out barbed wire around pre-
existing neighbourhoods and herd all the Jews inside. But that act also lent
45 Epstein 2008. For studies of the Bielski partisans, see Tec 2009; Duffy 2003; Levine 2009.
46 Hilberg quoted in Cole 2016, p. 54; emphasis added.

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novel value to the reservoirs of relative wilderness. ‘Luckily, they can’t barb
wire the entire forest’, one Jewish-Belorussian partisan later wrote.47 Now the
Bielskis have attained some late fame thanks to the Hollywood movie Defiance,
but the experience of Jewish-Communist partisanship in the Eastern European
forests certainly remains on the margins of historical consciousness, and quite
remarkably, there is a whole genre of partisan and survivor memoirs that has
not been trawled for its very distinctive representation of nature.48
Liza Ettinger witnessed the first mass-killings in the Lida ghetto and
expected the axe to fall again at any time. Then she and other inmates began to
receive visits from the partisans. ‘Just the thought that it was possible to realize
the daring dream of leaving the ghetto for the forest made a vital contribution
to the general morale of the ghetto’, she writes in her unpublished memoir.49
Ettinger was one of those who made it to New Yerushalaim. She recounts her
first impression of the site:
We reached Bielski’s partisan camp both hungry and tired. Although we

had heard much about it beforehand – still our first meeting with reality
was a surprise for us all. It all seemed like a fantasy from another world.
The same people – flesh and blood – but stronger and freer. A kind of gay
abandon filled the air; biting, frank talk spiced with juicy curses; gallop-
ing horses and the laughter of children. Everything seemed to float.50
Then she describes the particular relation she developed to Naliboki:
A forest of hikes and summer camps is nowhere like a forest where one
lives permanently and which serves as a refuge and a source of hope and
security as well. Every tree became a fortress, every thicket a stronghold,
the whole forest a constant friend, kind to all of us without awaiting any
award. If only I could sing a song of praise to the forest, our loyal friend!51
On this view, the wilderness experience of someone who seeks to get away
from the noise or reconnect with the simple life or prove his manliness is noth-
ing against the intensity of partisan survival. Only the hunted has access to full
affinity with wild nature.
47 David Bobrow in Paper 2003, p. 97.

48 A first inventory of the genre – very far from exhaustive – is presented in Cole 2014.
Cf. Weiner Weber 2008.
49 Ettinger 1984, p. 38.
50 Ettinger 1984, p. 48.
51 Ettinger 1984, p. 53.

Donia Rosen sketches a similar philosophy in The Forest, My Friend, begin-

ning with recollections from her Jewish childhood in a village in the Carpathian
Mountains. Most of the Jews who ended up in forests such as Naliboki had
lived their whole lives in cities and had no prior relation to this biome, but
Rosen learned to love the forest from a young age, and to grieve its gradual
retreat at the hands of loggers:
It hurt to see those great trees fall. It seemed as though the forest animals
shared the sorrow of the ancient pines as they fled into the depths of
the forest, far from every sign of man. […] The elders of the village often
voiced their concern that the wild, natural beauty would be spoiled by
the advance of modern ways.52
Thankfully, enough was left when the Nazis arrived: Donia Rosen survived by
fleeing deeper and deeper into the forest. Her diary is filled with odes to its
beauty and unconditional loyalty, such as this entry from 15 July 1943:
I am in a new place once again. This time it is a thick group of bushes

[…]. It is pleasant enough here, and I almost feel as though I am in a bird
nest. The nightingale is my friend and companion and his song amuses
me. […] I lie here and look at the infinite sky, at the stars, at the distant
valleys. Suddenly I feel an urge to wander. To go very far, to the unknown,
to walk, without stopping, to the ends of the earth.53
In times of absolute barbarism, wilderness becomes the repository of the civil,

the humane, the unconfined: of anticipation. One could pile up testimonies
to the same effect from Jewish and other anti-fascists, but I will stop here and
instead briefly draw out five implications of this history for the present.
Five Implications
One. At the very minimum, when there is no revolution in the offing, nor any
slavery or Holocaust, just the average barbarism of capital grinding on, places
with a high degree of wildness still hint at the possibility of life beyond capital.
I know of no Marxist who has captured this better than Adorno. ‘The image of
nature survives because its complete negation in the artefact […] is necessarily
52 Rosen 1971, pp. 1–2.

53 Rosen 1971, p. 67.

26 doi 10.1163/1569206X-00001610 | Malm
blind to what exists beyond bourgeois society, its labor, and its commodities.
Natural beauty remains the allegory of this beyond’: an allegory that can be
overwhelmingly intense in a place such as the rainforests of Dominica, as they
looked back in August of 2017, where mahoganies and crabs and parrots and
basil manifested their existence in exuberant indifference to the value-form.54
In the Cockpit Country or Naliboki, trees spring to life and stand and fall dead
with no regard whatsoever to the calculus of production: here biological cycles
are left to rule on their own and things can be just what they are, perhaps even
possess intrinsic value, a notion utterly indigestible for capital.
But on a theory of relative wilderness, someone from the capitalist heart-
lands need not go to such exotic locations to encounter the allegory. It might
suffice to leave the mall and just ramble into the nearest mountain or forest or
heath or archipelago – the effect is a function of the contrast between spaces
constructed by capital through and through and those that trace their lineage
from autonomous nature. In late-late capitalism, pockets of relative wilderness
assume an inestimable value as reminders – if only feeble and fleeting – of a
different order of things. The more total the power of capital, the more indis-
pensable they become.
But on this spectrum, the least-managed, wildest patches of nature retain
the greatest capacity to kindle the imagination. ‘The image of what is old-
est in nature reverses dialectically into the cipher of the not-yet-existing, the
possible.’55 This is what happened when a maroon or an abolitionist feasted
her eyes on the Great Dismal Swamp: the most archaic, unmodernised type of
Southern landscape dialectically reversed into the cipher of a possible future
freedom. Today, a remnant of wilderness, to quote Adorno again, ‘recollects a
world without domination’ – a world where capital is not the master-builder,
where things come into and go out of existence on their own, where the curse
of exchange-value has been lifted and all sorts of other generative forces are
given free reign.56 It is a non-capitalist sublime.
Two. The primordial capitalist impulse towards wilderness is aggression. When

the Republicans are now opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil
and gas companies, when the Polish government is sending in timber compa-
nies to cut down the Bialowieza forest, when palm-oil companies are chew-
ing up the peatlands and rainforests of the Aceh province – all asylums for
astounding biodiversity that have been spared, up to now – they are acting on
54 Adorno 2013, p. 94; emphasis added.

55 Adorno 2013, p. 100.
56 Adorno 2013, p. 91.

precisely that impulse. The classic American wilderness ideology might have
been bourgeois in character, but it was always a superficial epiphenomenon of
a machine for unprecedentedly rapid decimation of the wild. Revenue might
be extracted from protected areas, but it tends to be trifling compared to the
potential profits of unrestrained exploitation, and so conservation measures
under capitalism are fragile fetters that snap as soon as the state falls to the
more aggressive fractions of capital. In the current conjuncture, they snap like
twigs under a bulldozer.
There is bauxite in the soil of the Cockpit Country. Michael Grizzle can
scratch the outcroppings with his machete. For many years, American and
Chinese aluminium companies have been straining at the leash, and it is only
the resistance of the maroon communities and their allies in the environmen-
tal movement that has kept them back so far. But the Jamaican government
has still not conceded to the demand to make the Cockpit Country a national
park: it deliberately keeps the status of the area pending. The maroons have
vowed to go to war if it is handed over to the developers: ‘This is the territory
we fought for!’, they say. Grizzle likes to boast that he will chop off the head
of anyone who tries to go in for the bauxite. One should not necessarily take
such rhetoric literally, but there is no mistaking the sincerity of the commit-
ment: ‘It doesn’t matter if we could sell the cockpits for 135 trillion trillion tril-
lion dollars – they are worth more if they are still here so we can give them to
the next generation’, says chief Grizzle. This conflict is hard to squeeze into the
paradigm of the environmentalism of the poor, because the maroons in the
surrounding villages do not really base their livelihoods on the forest – they
extract few if any resources from it, have their small farms outside its perim-
eters and only occasionally venture inside. Nor does the Cockpit Country star
in their religion or cosmology. What it does constitute, however, is a land of
embodied independence and proud defiance, as the maroons themselves see
it: the foundation for their four centuries of existence, precisely insofar as it
has not been tamed by outsiders.
Conservation of wild spaces like this is anything but a superfluous luxury.
Every time it is extended into the future, some piece of the earth is snatched
from the jaws of capital. In a sense, the wild commons of nature are the spatial
equivalent of free time: a sphere of existence that has not yet been swallowed
up by expanded reproduction. We should fight to protect it, and to push back
and enlarge it.
Three. In her classic The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific
Revolution, Carolyn Merchant charts the ideological consequences of the tran-
sition to capitalism in England: the rise of the bourgeois view, spearheaded by

28 doi 10.1163/1569206X-00001610 | Malm
thinkers like Bacon and Locke, of nature as a source of disorder that must be
subordinated to the machine. Never before had the quality of wildness been
so incessantly vilified. And – the most well-known aspect of Merchant’s
argument – that wildness was coded female: ‘Like wild chaotic nature, women
needed to be subdued and kept in their place.’57 Now it strikes me that from the
US to Poland, the latest wave of aggression against wilderness areas goes hand
in hand with attacks on women, their bodily integrity and their reproductive
rights: for the Trumps of this world, pussies and parks are equally up for grabs.
As with so many other original links and intersections, this one seems to be
undergoing a late comeback. Perhaps it is time to dust off first-generation eco-
feminism and update it for times much harsher than the 1970s and ’80s?
Four. On 18 September 2017, Hurricane Maria suddenly accelerated to a cat-

egory 5 system – one of the most explosive intensifications of a hurricane on
record – and slammed straight into Dominica. Over one night, the green island
turned brown. The extraordinarily ferocious winds simply blew away the forest
cover. In the words of a stunned CNN reporter, one of the first to land at the
scene: ‘There is not a leaf on this island – the rainforests, you cannot see where
they are, they’re just not there.’58 The entire infrastructure – houses, roads,
bridges, hospitals, schools – was pulverised, the agricultural sector obliterated,
the financial cost estimated at twice the country’s GDP – but, as news agency
IRIN reported one month later: ‘the deeper sense of loss is off the spectrum’.59
In an earlier epoch, Dominica could perhaps have been rebuilt and the veg-
etation regrown, but in a warming world, we know, the hurricanes will return
again and again, stronger and stronger, fuelled and refuelled by the excess
energy stored in the ever-warmer rising seas. This island has been thrown
towards a state of uninhabitability.
Dominicans are finding themselves in a new war. Martial discourse appears
to have swept through that people since Maria. By November, a fifth of the pop-
ulation had left the island and more were leaving every week, while those who
stayed spoke of themselves as soldiers on a battlefield. Five days after the hur-
ricane, himself now homeless, prime minister Roosevelt Skerritt addressed the
United Nations General Assembly: ‘I come to you straight from the frontline of
the war. […] As Dominicans bear the brunt of climate change, we are shoulder-
ing the consequences of the actions of others, actions that endanger our very
57 Merchant 1990, p. 132.

58 C NN 2017.
59 Hansen 2017.

existence, and all for the enrichment of a few elsewhere.’60 The descendants
of the slaves and the maroons have done nothing to heat up this planet. As
I have said too many times already, this is not the Anthropocene: this is the
Capitalocene, when the capitalist mode of production exacts its brutal revenge
on a place like Dominica.
And the losses go deeper than so many buildings or dollars: the wild interior
of the island, the forested citadel, what Dominicans tended to view as the soul
of their culture, has been razed to the ground. This is certainly the point where
environmental injustice and destruction of wilderness converge. I have no idea
what happened to someone like Magnus. It is a very uncanny experience, to
have marvelled at the beauty of a place and enjoyed the company of its people
and six weeks later – it’s gone. I do not know if you have had similar experi-
ences, but they are certain to become more common in the decades ahead.
There is a paradox here. Wilderness might have offered some refuge from
a world fully permeated by capital, but in a warming world the spaces at the
farthest remove from the central circuits of accumulation are those where the
impacts of fossil capital are most eye-catching. The mall is kept optimally air-
conditioned all year round. Life in city centres of advanced capitalist coun-
tries can go on as though insulated. The storm may enter Manhattan, but
it withdraws and leaves the skyline intact. If you want to track the progress
of this storm, there is no better place to station yourself than in some wild
nature, where even basic features are sliding out of existence. The highest peak
in Sweden will literally disappear any year now, since it consists of a glacier
the melting of which has become irreversible – climate change is very much
in-your-face in the farthest north, whereas the financial districts of central
Stockholm maintain an immaculate façade. Inside and outside seem to have
switched places – or, rather, what used to be the wild outside now seems to
have become the compartment of a totalised inside that undergoes the most
rapid and spectacular disfiguration. That would be a poor sanctuary indeed.
And so perhaps global warming will then effect even further constriction of
the political imagination. There is a lot of speculation about how it might inau-
gurate a new era of barbarisms; if it does, it will be in proportion to the decline
of the supply of wild nature in which to seek shelter, physically or imagina-
tively. The greenhouse gas chamber will be planetary.
In short, global warming looks like the final victory of the capitalist class:
the moment when there is no more ‘Land that is left wholly to Nature’ for peo-
ple like Locke to detest, when capital has taken control of the air itself and
subsumed under its suffocating rule even the wildest mountains. Finally, the
60 Skerritt 2017.

30 doi 10.1163/1569206X-00001610 | Malm
forests of trees in the interior parts of Dominica have been cleared, more than
two centuries after planter Atwood dreamed of it. But subsumption is per-
haps not the appropriate category here. The land of Dominica has not really
been subsumed under capital – it has not been integrated into the process of
accumulation, the way a plantation was; it has not had its resources repur-
posed and re-engineered for profit; it has not been domesticated: it has simply
been destroyed. In that sense, climate change looks more like a war of anni-
hilation than one of domination – and it is high time we recognise it for the
war it is. As the case of Dominica shows, one group of people is killing another
group or otherwise laying their lives – including their culture, their history, the
very lands they stand on – to waste. It is shock and awe plus scorched-earth
tactics. It is affluent, predominantly white people dumping their lethal sub-
stances over the heads of poor people, predominantly of colour, with immea-
surable beauty eradicated in the process. But is anyone fighting back? Is this a
war of two combatants, or only one?
Earlier in the unprecedentedly catastrophic hurricane season of 2017, the
London Review of Books sent out essays on climate change from its archives
to all subscribers. In one of them, John Lanchester observes that ‘it is strange
and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of
terrorism’ – indeed it is
especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blow-
ing up petrol stations, or vandalising SUVs. […] Say fifty people vandal-
ising four cars each night for a month: six thousand trashed SUVs in a
month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our
streets. So why don’t these things happen?61
Those words were written in 2007, before the floods in Pakistan, before the
heatwaves in the Persian Gulf, before the wildfires in Portugal, before the melt-
down of the Arctic ecosystem set in for real, before the mudslides in Sierra
Leone, before the hyperactive 2017 hurricane season in the Caribbean. It is
strange and striking indeed. I think Jacko and Nanny and Makandal and the
Bielski partisans would also agree on this.
Five. A fence is under construction at the border between Slovenia and Croatia.
On the bank of the Kolpa river, three broad spirals of razor wire cut straight
through the luxurious vegetation. They are intended to keep migrants out, but
they also happen to have another effect: built through one of the wildest areas
61 Lanchester 2007, p. 3.

of Europe, a treasure-trove of lingering biodiversity, the fence suddenly blocks

the path of the bear and the lynx and the wolves and the deer that used to
roam these tracts freely.62 This is just the latest manifestation of a universal
law: fortified borders are poison for wildlife – and never more so than when
temperatures rise, when the only chance animals have to adapt is relocation
towards the north. If northern states continue to multiply and reinforce their
walls, wildlife fleeing the rising heat will run into the same walls as Dominicans
and other human beings whose homelands have become unliveable, who
have no responsibility for the catastrophe, who by any ethical standard deserve
the right to move to safer lands – but even if you don’t give a shit about these
people, and if you only care for the wild, as men like Kingsnorth and Foreman
claim to do, then you have to cry out for no borders. He who loves borders
must have something other than wilderness closest to his heart. And it might
be worth pointing out, in this context, that neither the maroons nor the Jewish
partisans had any kind of native, Heideggerian, blood-and-soil bonds to the
landscapes they came to inhabit. They were the dispossessed and the hounded.
If they can inspire a wilderness politics, surely it must be cosmopolitan. If we
can have a tribe of wild Marxists, surely our first demand must be that all bor-
der-walls and fences and other controls come down. In the words that Vic Reid
attributes to Nanny: ‘It does not matter where we come from; it matters that
we are here’.
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Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

In Wildness is the Liberation of the World:

wilderness – migration – slavery – maroons – Jewish partisans – climate change

Wilderness has got a bad name in the environmental movement. It might be

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001610

and dreaming of the wild is a function of the catastrophic magnitude of more

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

Celebrating the Dark Mountain

Now let there be no mistake: wilderness deserves this reputation. It is perpetu-

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

4 Kingsnorth 2017a, pp. 61, 66, 280; emphases added.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

pages of The Guardian, Kingsnorth preaches the gospel of ‘green national-

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

Towards a People’s History of Wilderness

11 Vogel 2015.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

He left it there, and no ecological Marxists have, to my knowledge, pursued

In Permanent Opposition to Everything Below

We would do well to remember that the capitalist class was brought up on

13 Smith 1998, p. 278.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

of human beings – more precisely property-owning, industrious human

Fortunes were made in a day […] and unexampled prosperity seemed

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

subject, which hath occasioned the Reflection of a Negro much quoted

16 Anon. 1676, pp. 6–7.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

The Free Forests of Dominica

19 Glissant 2001, pp. 16, 141.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

the necessity, in order to render Dominica a good sugar country, of clear-

22 Atwood 1791, pp. 22, 81.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

The Resistance Science of Jamaica

In western Jamaica, there is a vast forest known as the Cockpit Country. It is

27 Governor Balcarres quoted in Campbell 1988, pp. 216, 218–19.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

29 Bilby 2005, p. 106.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

Marronage as Betrayal and Beacon

31 ‘Wild negroes’: Lieutenant Thickness quoted in Campbell 1988, p. 124.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

32 Glissant 2001, p. 90.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

A Maroon State Writ Large

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

intersected by a lofty range of mountains thickly serried with primeval

They Had Gone Out to What they Called the Wilderness

35 Fick 1990; Ferrer 2014, p. 231.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

this last word emphasised in the original.37

Montejo found the adjustment from marronage to wage-labour difficult,

37 Quoted in Craton 1982, p. 250.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

40 Sayers 2015.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

yielding presently to a grand burst of the favourite marching song among

All true children gwine in de wilderness,

Fighting Fascism from the Forests

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–35

4 Kingsnorth 2017a, pp. 61, 66, 280; emphases added.

11 Vogel 2015.

13 Smith 1998, p. 278.

16 Anon. 1676, pp. 6–7.

19 Glissant 2001, pp. 16, 141.

22 Atwood 1791, pp. 22, 81.

27 Governor Balcarres quoted in Campbell 1988, pp. 216, 218–19.

29 Bilby 2005, p. 106.

31 ‘Wild negroes’: Lieutenant Thickness quoted in Campbell 1988, p. 124.

32 Glissant 2001, p. 90.

35 Fick 1990; Ferrer 2014, p. 231.

37 Quoted in Craton 1982, p. 250.

40 Sayers 2015.

47 David Bobrow in Paper 2003, p. 97.

52 Rosen 1971, pp. 1–2.

54 Adorno 2013, p. 94; emphasis added.

57 Merchant 1990, p. 132.

60 Skerritt 2017.

61 Lanchester 2007, p. 3.